The Three Stages of Dark Water
by Lunar Chasmodai
Summary: [I'd call it SasuNaru friendship, but it's completely unintelligible anyway] All his life, Sasuke has marked the world by dark water, three stages of life. He's spent endless days avoiding the third stage but, unfortunately, the sun doesn't like that.


Wrote this a while ago. It makes no sense. I swear. None. If you tacked on a randomly generated string of words, no one would notice. At all. This is unbeta'd, by the way, because no one would be able to understand it anyway. This isn't crack, it's heroin. (I don't actually expect people to read this, I just needed to post it so I could delete the file off my computer XP)  
I don't own…much.

The Three Stages of Dark Water.

* * *

Sasuke liked dark water. It was pretty to him. When he was younger he would sit by the pond near his house and just dangle his feet a few inches above the surface. No matter where he was, he was always there in front of the pond, real or imagined, and his toes never quite tickled the surface. As time passed, he came to identify the Three Stages of Dark Water.

Long days passed, civilizations died and new ones were born and they died again. Death wasn't new, not for Sasuke and not the worlds that played out their destruction in his head. It was always quiet, never loud and when the surface of the water rippled, Sasuke would blame whatever horror was playing in his mind and quickly silence it, only to have it resume once the water had stilled again to a glassy surface. He would be more careful next time, to make sure that none of the blood that ran through his thoughts would hit the surface of the water.

All the days after his parents died and he had to fend for himself, those were the days of the first stage. In the first stage, the anger, the pain, would come and go, able to be caught and stopped before anyone saw it, before it destroyed the peaceful calm of the mirror of dark water. Days, years passed like that, caught, stopped, hidden, resumed, the anger and pain that was hidden just below the perfect surface of the dark water. The destruction of worlds was sheltered behind the mystery.  
The destruction of worlds faded over time. They were replaced by words, words that showed themselves when Sasuke breathed icy breath on the edge of the black pond. If the dark water was cold enough, it would freeze into a dark mirror. It was fragile, though, and Sasuke was afraid to break it. He had done it a few times, and he had no desire to repeat.

Instead, the words fell like snow. They piled up, piling but not breaking. They were the only substance that the black ice could support and they remained their, buried, for an indefinite amount of time until eventually they sunk into the dark water and disappeared, like they had never existed.

For so long, day after day Sasuke would sit, under the watchful eye of Orochimaru. He would avoid the dark water at all costs, trying not to break its service. Words infected his mind and he wanted to chase them away, but no, they were still piling, and he would break the shadow ice if her were to step out to try and melt them with his breath.

Then he returned to Konoha. The ice had yet to melt, had yet to give way. Words still piled, unspoken, unsaid, fading to oblivion and being as if they had never existed. Sasuke still sat at the edge and wait, his toes sometimes brushing over the snow and mussing the perfect patterns. He would hear the ice crack and recoil, wanting to run as far as possible, but the ice mirror, dark as the night, kept him. He merely held his breath a moment, hoping beyond reason that the ice would not break.

Then it began to melt. It began to melt and the surface of the dark water became thinner, thinner, the water below it heated with the onset of summer and the snow, words that wouldn't stop falling, piled up and suddenly, almost like some great dam broke, the ice was crushed under the weight of the snow and the ripples were too large for it to disappear into oblivion and pretend it was just like it had been. Too late.

Then, abruptly, the Second Stage of Dark Water came to a Meaningful Capitalized Screeching Halt.

"Sasuke!" Sasuke turns to the sound of the voice. The person addressing him is blond, blue eyed, and obviously fairly amused. "I heard you flipped out." A vulpine grin splits his features in two along his face widthwise.

"I did not flip out," Sasuke hears himself reply. The words flit in the air, hanging, almost as if there needed to be more but wasn't. Leaves rustle down the street, whispering obscene songs to the wind, a stanza every block.

"No?" the blond boy asks, the space between Sasuke and himself decreasing. "I think you did." His smile becomes more fiendish and he winks.  
Sasuke grits his teeth against each other, ignoring their cries of pain. "I did not."

"You screamed a topic less rant," the blond boy observes. He bites his lip. "I'm sorry." He never apologizes make it stop make it stop make it stop.

"You're not at fault." Sasuke can tell his tone is colder than intended. A little bit of the dark water freezes over. "I appreciate your concern." He steps back. The fair-haired boy matches his backwards rampage across the domain of the gutter.

"You don't mean it," he purrs. "You just want me to leave."

"Naruto," Sasuke sighs in exasperation. Another pause, the words suspended once again by invisible cord. Maybe it is invisible or maybe, when Sasuke looks closer, it has the faintest red tinge, the sun that sets over the black ice every night and rises up each morning.

Naruto sighs a breath of bird wings, herds Sasuke against a slender linden tree. "I don't believe you," he informs the leaves, Sasuke just happening to be listening. Sasuke shivers in the cold. The ice is melting, the little shards disappearing into the ground, leaving traces. Sasuke isn't sure if it is the broken ice or the markers of change that unnerve him so much.

"You should," he returns, staring up at the yellow mountain. It replies with the blue stare of the sky.

Naruto sighs. "You really should try and open up." His eyes drop to the cracks in the earth of the sidewalk dweller's world. "We care about you." By now, the ice is nearly gone and it terrifies Sasuke. All the time he had spent, locked up in his own little prison at Orochimaru's staring only at the frozen, dark water and singing songs to it, he had been alone.  
The change is frightening.

"The ice is melting," the moon informs the sun.

The sun shrugs. "I know."

"Will you come with me? I don't want to be alone." The moon bows its head, the night spilling forth from its crown. The sun nods.

"Of course." Naruto put one hand on Sasuke shoulder, running it down his arm to reach his hand and leading him down the sidewalk.

They pass the movie theatre that wasn't there until 1943 and won't close until sometime in the sixties, that wouldn't be there for too long, wouldn't be there in that place at all. Ice cream vendors laugh out loud as they pass blue popsicles to whining children and tell them it's 'usually a dime but for you, a nickel', and even though Sasuke has never seen a nickel, he smiles.

They reach the pond. The water is frigid, but the ice is all gone.

"Are you scared?" Naruto asks.

Sasuke shakes his head. "No." Liarfilthyrottenliarimaliaryoushouldkillme...

"Good."

Splash.

And the third stage of dark water begins.


End file.
